Optimization of Wireless Power Transfer Systems with Multiple Transmitters and Receivers

Wireless Power Transfer (WPT) has undergone a revolution, being transformed from a somewhat fantastical technology of the future to reality, encompassing a large variety of applications and forming a billion-dollar industry. Wireless charging of devices, ranging from mobile phones to biomedical implants and electric vehicles has been long imagined. Over the past few years, thousands of these products and solutions have been developed and reached a customer base of dozens of million users. Despite the impressive advancements and practical implementations in the field, the physical limitations of WPT have not been rigorously explored, apart from simple systems consisting of a single transmitter-receiver pair. A universal all-encompassing framework from which general WPT systems can be optimized, analyzed and compared remains elusive all the same. Such a framework, from which these fundamental limits could be obtained, would be invaluable to the community, setting an absolute upper bound on performance to which any and all specific implementations could be compared and contrasted. Moreover, the framework could allow a deeper understanding of the underlying physics of such systems, resulting in improved design guidelines and optimal design rules. This work aims to bridge this gap by providing optimization methods for general WPT systems, consisting of an arbitrary number of transmitters and receivers, in order to determine the absolute maximum achievable performance of said systems. The methods are based on convex optimization, which effectively guarantees to find global maxima. Furthermore, implementations of maximally efficient systems are presented and investigated, to gain insight into how these limits may be achieved. Practical examples and related applications, including antenna arrays and magnetically mediated hyperthermia for cancer treatment, illustrate the usefulness and capabilities of these findings.Ph.D